Nice to see Twitter rolling out so many new things, like Lists, which seems to be taking off (though I find the lack of a discovery interface vexing, for now).

Retweeting is integrated in an elegant way, tweets that have been retweeted have a little cycled arrow icon, which identifies tweets that folks you've followed have retweeted. Another signal (as are Lists) that Twitter will be able to use as core data to drive its unique value. Watch that space, it's where Twitter will win (or lose).

Twitter also added the ability to retweet any tweet from within Twitter.com, as you can see in the bottom left of the pic below. No doubt this is all already in the API, as Lists was when it rolled out.

Now, why does all this matter? Well, it helps Twitter, as I already said, by providing the company with very valuable core data about what people find worthy of attention. And signals of attention are gold in a data driven platform like Twitter. Secondly, it addresses the continuing problem of discovery - seeing what has been retweeted helps people find others who might be worth following.

Danny was kind enough to ping me about this story, which breaks the news about Google's new "Dashboard," which is, in essence, a first start toward realizing the "privacy dashboard" I asked for so long ago (and again here), back when I was posting ideas like a madman (I'm going to be doing that again shortly, so watch out...).

It's a big deal I think, even if most of us never use it. And it's very smart of Google to lead here. It really had no choice, when you think about it. And it's kind of cool to see stuff I wrote about here over three years ago happen in the real world.

The sphere is abuzz with today's news that AT&T is suing Verizon over those apparently quite effective ads which borrow heavily from Apple's tagline - "There's an App for that..." Verizon has created a map that compares AT&T 3G coverage to Verizon's, and then uses the tagline "there's a map for that." (Above is the commercial, here's the map.)

Well, I've been ranting about a real carrier mapping application (executed as a marketing campaign, natch), for nearly three years, and while I've told just about everyone I can about it, so far it's still not done (I know, I know, we should make it ourselves, right? Well, maybe we will!).

Meanwhile, here's the idea. If any of you brilliant coder/UX/marketing geniuses want to go do it, just credit FM and I, ok?

The main value of the program? It provides a place where anyone can put a pin on a map and annotate (with four part ranting harmony if they'd like) where their calls are dropped. A service like this exists - deadcellzones.com - but it's not quite what I had in mind. It's got the guts of what I've suggested, but not the scale, interface, community feel, conversational dialog, or program backing. And by program, I mean a major carrier practicing the true principles of conversational marketing, and owning the dialog - listening, responding, and acting upon the input.

I imagine the program working something like this. A major carrier - let's say AT&T, since it's in the news today - decides to build this app. It then announces the app in a major marketing program via a traditional marketing platform (web, TV, etc.). Say you're on Boing Boing, and you see a STAMP execution that announces the new service - perhaps the ad itself is a widget that allows you to push a pin into the map based on a zip code, or whatever. One thing I know, everyone I've ever talked to has a story about how frustrated they are about dropped calls, and everyone has a list of places that are always dropping calls (for me, it's the tunnels around the GGBridge, Sand Hill Road area, and on and on...). So give them a platform to vent about it.

But wait, there's more! Venting is nice, but what'd be nicer is if your venting actually created change in the world! Imagine that! Well, if you're a major carrier, you *can* do something about it. In fact, folks are always giving carriers grief for not putting up more cel sites, but in many cases, the real reasons they can't have nothing to do with profits, and everything to do with the local city council, or geography, or other factors.

So, here's the play: As the pins pile up, those areas which have the most pins start to get "hotter" in a visual way on the map. And then comes the key part: The carrier promises, in its marketing, to address the top ten "hot spots" each quarter (or month, or whatever period of time makes sense). Note I said "address" and not "fix." Why? Because in some cases, there is no fix. For example, coverage at the North end of the Golden Gate Bridge is permanently bad, because, I am told by folks who know, it's very hard to get permission to place cel sites in the right places (the area is a national park *and* part of Sausalito, a notoriously unfriendly place when it comes to outside companies like cel carriers).

So in a case like the North end of the Golden Gate, AT&T "addresses" the problem by responding on the map itself, providing an explanation of why the company can't fix the problem, and suggesting that if consumers are upset, they might write a note to the Sausalito city councilmembers and/or the supervisors of the national park (and provide links, of course!).

The application is a mashup of sorts, blending Google Maps, crowdsourcing, geolocation, and commenting systems.

The plane is about to land, so I have to post and run. I'll revise this when I get back on terra firma. But I believe that whichever carrier actually executes on that map will, in my mind, really win the game. More on why as I update this.

In short, if done right, Lists will provide the Twitter ecosystem a third dimension that might just propel it beyond the hype curve and into a long term platform play. Combined (intelligently) with the new traffic coming from Google and Bing, and this could mean Very Big Things for  Twitter.

All this bears further discussion. And I promise to to that, soon. I just wanted to leave a note here that I think this is important, and hopefully, when I stop traveling and start thinking a bit more, I'll dig in here.

Last week was big for Twitter. After years of speculation about whether the company was going to have a business model, Twitter announced two deals at our Web2 conference - first with Microsoft's Bing, and second with Google. Details of the deals were not disclosed, but as Google's Marissa Mayers admitted onstage, there were indeed financial terms.  

What those terms might be strike me as secondary to the fact the deals got done in the first place. Sure, they probably consist of some combination of data services fees and revenue sharing, but the fact remains that monetizing a real time search result remains an elusive art, and one that honestly, Twitter does not want to cede to either Google or Microsoft. So while the two battling search giants may toss a not-insignificant amount of Adwords or AdCenter revenue into Twitters' coffers, what really matters is the the traffic these deals potentially represent, and the validation of Twitter's role in the real time universe. That, I'd argue, is priceless.

Now, did Microsoft and Google do these deals simply to lay claim to a hot new service, or were their actions driven by the time-honored principle of "embrace and extend"? More on that in a future post, because I think the question begs consideration in light of where the culture of search and communication is headed.

The fact that both giants have validated Twitter's role in search led me to reflect on the role that Twitter plays in our culture. "To Tweet" is a verb in the process of becoming - not unlike "To Google" in 2002-3, or "to Xerox" in the 1960s. So what does "tweet" mean, really? Or perhaps more to the point, what *should* it mean?

At the moment, "to tweet" means something along the lines of "to broadcast a thought, in real time, using 140 characters of text or less." And while confining tweets to this creative box has been seminal to the service's early success, I'd argue that continuing to do so will most likely consign Twitter to the status of a verbal footnote in our ongoing cultural conversation.

What I'm struggling to say is that definitions matter. Words matter. My anthropological spidey senses are tingling right now, because we're in a cultural moment where we are redefining how we share a moment. Facebook knows this. Google and Microsoft know it as well. And we all know it - explicitly or implicitly, as a culture we are learning to share our moments in real time, irrespective of geography or traditional social boundaries.

So allow me to suggest what I believe the definition of the verb "to tweet" should become: "To share a moment."

In other words, to truly scale, "Tweet" - the verb-in-process-of-becoming, or, alternatively, the verb-that-could-have-been-but-became-instead-a-footnote-in-history - needs to be defined by more than 140 characters of text.

If you abstract what we're really trying to do with the creative box Twitter has imposed upon us, it's this: We want to share a meaningful moment in time. Sure, we don't all manage to do that so well, but I think the essence of what we're trying to do - "share," "meaningful," and "moment" - can easily be abstracted from the creative box in which Twitter is currently confined.

If you've used a tool like Brizzly, Power Twitter, or any of the many other services that unpack and contextualize your Twitter stream, it's clear that a tweet is much more than text. It can be an image, a video, an overheard snippet of speech. In short, it's a moment, captured, imbued with meaning, and shared.

As long as it remains those things, it's a tweet. And as much as I love the SMS-inspired roots of Twitter's origin, it's time for the service to branch out and embrace its essence, and not get stuck in its own creation myth. If it fails to do so, I think any number of its competitors - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or an unborn startup - will recognize and exploit that failure.

So live in the moment, Twitter, and move outside the text box.

PS - I think the same applies to the interface of search - breaking out of keyboard-driven text and more into a conversational interface. I'll have a lot more to say about this in the coming months, as I think it's starting to come together in my head - "The Moment" is a good organizing principle for where I believe things are going in search, culture, technology.

Here's a screen shot of my playlist. I'll make it live soon. (And yes, btw, the songs and their timing with sessions often mean something. But I can't really get into what and why right now.)

Every month I look at Twitter's traffic, and for September, the trend continues to be flat to down. Has Twitter peaked, or is it time for the company to start showing us traffic through its API and via SMS, so we can really understand the service's growth?

Here are Quantcast and Compete's data.

The embedded chart is from Compete.

While it's fair to argue they only capture traffic to Twitter.com, it's still instructive to see that traffic to that particular domain has flattened or fallen off.

Earnings are coming in that make for happy year over year comps, and hence, a happy time in tech land. Intel, Google, IBM all

beating expectations - welcome news for an economy that has felt pretty damn terrible lately. And now the Dow has touched 10K and stayed there - something we haven't seen for a year.  

But I still worry - do you? I worry we'll over correct, and lose the perspective we've all earned over the last year of pain. I sure hope we don't. That said, I sure am happy to see the gloom lifting. We're going into winter, but it sort of feels like Spring right now....

More here.

I'm so focused on Web 2 and FM right now I can't grok this. But you guys can - Aardvark, which I have written about in the past and will present at Web 2 next week, has launched a social search function based on their growing people-powered network. What do you all think?

That's the first question I have for Tim when he joins us at Web 2 next week. What do you want me to ask him?

As you most likely know, Tim came to AOL from Google, where he ran North American ad sales for years. Clearly, Tim relishes a challenge, and sees an opportunity. And, while Tim probably is too politic to discuss it, AOL will be spun out soon, and either go public or become an independent entity (unwinding the most disastrous new/old media merger in recent history).

So...what do you want to know from Tim? I've got my own list - which I've discussed with Tim already - but you all will have even better ideas, as usual...

Others we'll be interviewing (and I've asked for your help):

Shantanu Narayen

Carly Fiorina

Jon Miller

Sheryl Sandberg

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Tim Berners Lee, and more. An amazing lineup and less than one week away!

Also, remember to tweet your questions for any of the folks above with the #w2s hashtag for a chance to win a free Web 2 Summit pass - we'll be picking three at random to win...